Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Michael Ledo Chen Shi, the master travels from Canton north to Tianjin, in hopes of opening a school. He takes himself a wife for cover. He is the last master of the Wing Chun knife fighting method. In order to open a school, he must train an apprentice to defeat 8 masters of the 19 schools. Now for the part I didn't grasp. Because the person who defeats the masters brings dishonor to the city, he must die or leave the city which is why Wing Chun doesn't fight himself. It didn't cross over culturally, but was interesting to have a peak inside China 1930's.Lots of fighting with knives and sticks. Watched it in Chinese with English subtitles.

tenshi_ippikiookami "The Final Master" (or just 'Master', as the 'Shīfu' of the original title means) is an interesting martial arts movie, with great atmosphere, camera work and music, but not so good action.The story is simple. Here we have a Wing Chun master (must all kung fu masters have to be Wing Chun masters?; oh, well...) that wants to open a school in Tianjin. He just can't do it, so he decides to choose a random guy from the streets, and teach him his art. The plan is that the apprentice may go and fight masters from other schools, and when he defeats over 8, the master can open his own school. However, then the apprentice will have to be sacrificed so the other schools don't lose face...The story is not very complicated, but Haofeng Xu's direction goes for moody and atmospheric, a very specific camera work and edit, with short cuts and a little bit tongue-in-cheek style, not so common on martial arts movies. It perfectly suits the movie, and makes it have a very interesting tinge.Sadly, the action doesn't deliver as it should. It may be realistic (I am not an expert on this kind of knife fighting), but it doesn't grip the viewer as it could. It just looks a little bit fake, and the fights lack some energy. There is not much originality in the movements, the locations or the pace of the fights, and they don't have as much tension as they should. That lack of tension becomes more and more clear as the ending gets closer."The Final Master" will be enjoyed by martial arts fans, but it feels like a half-baked effort.

subxerogravity I went into this motion picture expecting more of a Kung Fu extravaganza (although the last showdown in the film was pretty bad ass). When the movie opens and the lead actor explains that he is a Wing Chun master I was totally expecting a rip off of Ip man, but with swords instead of fist. Though the movie showcases that screeching sound two swords make during signature Wing Chun blade fights this movie does not hold a candle to the Ip Man Franchise.Like Ip Man, it's both a drama and an action flick, but to both genres I felt Ip Man was far more compelling. As this movie try to do both it became unbalanced trying to sustain it. I found the drama too dry and weak to want to pay attention to it. I thought the wing Chun was just OK due to fast cuts that make it seem like the movie had no one in it who was a master of the style. In fact the whole movie seem to be cut together at a pace that makes neither genre work well for me.I did appreciate some scenes where it looked like the camera shot was paying homage to old school Kung Fu flicks and the art direction does really take you back to the 1920s, but honestly this movie moved too slow and had too much to take in to really entertain.

awallenwein-47391 I could not disagree more with the reviewer who calls this a "laughable" movie. I did not see the whole movie, only the fight scene where the main character uses his Bart Cham Dao to defeat his challengers. Of course the movie is "choreographed". All martial arts movies are, and especially this one where nothing but real blades are used could not be filmed otherwise.The choreography is probably the best I have seen in the entire series of "Ip Man" movies. I have never seen a fight scene involving the Wing Chun double blades that had better timing and more realistic techniques and exchanges than this one. Over-dramatized? Of course. That's what martial arts movies are all about. But here it was done in a credible way that leaves you with the impression that the actors actually know what they are doing and have practiced for a long time in real life.